SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Do you have a profile for your businesses on Instagram? Do you use Facebook to promote your business? Do you often get confused when someone talks about social media marketing? Well, in that case, read what we have to tell you.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

Social Media Marketing is using social media platforms to connect with your audience for brand building, driving website traffic and increasing sales. Social Media Marketing involves publishing creative content over social media platforms, engaging your followers, analysing your results and running social media advertisements. Connecting with customers via social media is an essential method to promote all kinds of businesses. This helps in constructing a better brand image, associating with local clients and improving your client database. Around 90% of advertisers say online networking is essential for the online presence of their business.

BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Increase Brand Awareness

It’s easy to assume why building your brand awareness is critical. Social media can boost this process because it’s a platform with tons of people in one place. Thus, giving the potential visibility to your brand.

Here are a few ways social media can supercharge your brand awareness:

•          Enables engagement
•          Promotes content
•          Social sharing

Lead Generation and Boost Conversions

Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you’re advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.

Here are some examples of ways you can use social media to generate more leads.

• Create contests 
• Include links to your website and
• Host live videos 
• Implement a social media marketing campaign 
• Sell your products through your social profiles.

Foster Your Relationships with Customers

By connecting and engaging with your social media followers, you’ll be able to build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and providing them with any help they may need. You can also ask your followers questions about your products, their pain points, or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.

Learn from your competition

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether that’s in reference to their social media tactics, the products they’re promoting, the campaigns they’re implementing, or their level of interaction with followers. Social media allows you to get a look at what is and isn’t working for your competition, and therefore helps you decide what should or shouldn’t change in terms of your company’s approach. Lastly, reviewing the social accounts of your competitors can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

Different social media channels help you reach specific audiences.

Another benefit of social media marketing is that you are able to strategically target different audiences based on the channels that your brand is active on. Rather than just putting your marketing message out there for everyone to see, you can reach your target market and work to drive more qualified leads back to your site. Create a clear list of your audience demographic values – the more detailed it is, the better. This list can include their gender, age, location, interests, the brands they follow, hobbies, etc. Knowing these values will give you more idea on which social media channel you should use to reach them. Also, this will help you in creating content that will engage your audience thus increasing your chances for conversions.

Marketing through social media is cost effective.

One of the greatest benefits of marketing through social media is that it helps you cut marketing costs without sacrificing results. Most of your social media results will come from investing time in creating and publishing content as well as having conversations with your fans and followers. The good news is that even just a few hours a week can have significant results.

Social media marketing may help improve your search engine rankings.

There’s a good chance that you’re already focused on improving your search engine optimization. Successful brands tend to have a healthy social media presence, so a strong social media presence may act as a signal to search engines that your brand is valuable, credible, and trustworthy.

Social media marketing leads to higher conversion rates.

Every post you make and each interaction you have on your social media channels is an opportunity to convert an interested lead into a happy customer. By building a report with your leads and customers and posting valuable content on a consistent basis, your brand can work to improve trust and credibility, which leads to more conversions.

Social media marketing helps improve brand loyalty.

While larger companies can afford to build big and expensive customer loyalty programs, small businesses have to rely on other, more affordable methods for building brand loyalty. Social media is an effective way to build relationships with leads and customers that lead to greater satisfaction and loyalty over time. 

Engaging with your customers and leads on social media helps you build stronger customer relationships. This can set you apart from your competition by showing your audience how your brand is different and reinforcing that your business cares about its customers. 

Your competition is on social media.

No matter what industry you are in or who your target market is, there is a good chance that your competitors are already present and involved on social media channels. This not only suggests that there is opportunity for your brand to do well on these channels, but it means that some of your potential customers may already be talking with the competition as we speak.

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list!

PILLARS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

1. Strategy

Start with determining your business goals whether you want to establish brand awareness, engage with your audience or reach out to potential customers. Next, find out which social media platform is best for your needs. Now, if you’ve decided on your business goals and which platforms to concentrate on, it’s time to consider the nature of the content that your business can share. Different types of content require a different amount of time or budget investment, so find out the types of content your target audience engages with most.

2. Prepping your Content

A steady, pre-planned posting schedule shows your audience that your brand is reliable, accessible, and professional. This is typically known as a content calendar, where you have a series of posts already lined up for the upcoming days in a month.

3. Listening and Engagement

As your business and social media following grows, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly. While you can’t control everything that’s said about your brand, you must know what’s being said so you may react accordingly. Ensure that positive comments are met with enthusiasm and appreciation, while negative feedback is deescalated and rectified.

4. Paid Media and Advertising

Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

5. Analytics

The practice of gathering data from social media platforms and analyzing data using social media analytics tools to make business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment to support marketing activities.

HOW TO BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY?

Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social media.

One of the simplest ways to create your social media marketing strategy is to ask yourself the 5 W's:

·         Why do you want to be on social media?

·         Who is your target audience?

·         What are you going to share?

·         Where are you going share?

·         When are you going share?

STEPS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

•   Set goals that make sense for your business
•  Research your target audience
•  Establish your most important metrics
•  Dig into what your competitors are doing
•  Create and curate engaging social content
•  Make timeliness a top priority
•  Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve
•  Communicate goals, challenges and wins with your team

Social Media Marketing takes a professional level of dedication to achieve results. You have read about the five core pillars of social media marketing that are crucial to making your marketing efforts a success. If you are waiting for the right marketing partners to join you on this journey, then we have a lot to talk about. Visit our website https://www.techfaktory.com/